Biography

Federica Francesconi is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Judaic Studies Program at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her research and publications address the social, religious, and cultural aspects of the early modern history of Jews in Italy, focusing on the multifaceted politics and dynamics of ghetto life. Her recent book, Invisible Enlighteners: The Jewish Merchants of Modena, from the Renaissance to the Emancipation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), is the 2022 Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize Winner, granted by the American Historical Association. She has held fellowships in Europe, Israel, and the United States. Her new project, tentatively titled The Jewish Home in Early Modern Venice: Cosmopolitan Intimacy, Global Networks, and Diasporic Material Culture, has received a 2022-24 Gladys Krieble Delmas Grant.

Project Summary

This project explores the Jewish home in Venice during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a multi-religious and multi-ethnic webwork of individuals, communities, and objects in motion. Although the ghetto was a space of physical segregation, oppression, and housing scarcity, unlike many domestic spaces of that era, the Jewish homes in Venice connected outward to the broader Mediterranean world. This system included cities such as Istanbul, Corfu, Thessaloniki, Jerusalem, Cairo, Fez, Tunis, Skopje, Malta, and Constantine. This project uncovers an unexplored nexus of early modern Italian and Jewish culture, Jewish, Christian, and Muslims encounters, and the global Renaissance. It is based on unpublished archival sources in Italian, Hebrew, Latin, Yiddish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Ladino, illuminated and printed books, extant material culture, and the built environment. It uncovers an unexplored nexus of early modern Italian and Jewish culture, Jewish, Christian, and Muslims encounters, and the global Renaissance. Ultimately, this project argues that the Jewish home was equally shaped by both routes and roots because of the specific histories of the individuals and diverse communities that lived there. The Jewish home was both a receptacle of complex histories of interaction, displacement, and transculturation (routes) and a space in which premodern Jewish identities were shaped by crossing social, cultural, religious, and ethnic boundaries - crossings that were invariably contingent and unstable (roots).